The present invention relates generally to the trading of financial instruments, and more particularly to a method and system for automatically communicating trade orders for financial instruments through an on-line trading account with a financial institution.
Over recent years, two particular topics have been the focus of substantial attention. One of these topics is the trading of various types of financial instruments, such as securities, stocks, bonds, currencies, options, futures and derivatives thereof. As used herein the terms trade and/or trading generally refers to transactions such as buying and/or selling. The successful trading of such financial instruments often involves the research, development and historical testing of a system or methodology (“Trading Plan”). Such a Trading Plan is used by a trader for exploiting anticipated price change opportunities, and also for controlling risk because prices often move contrary to the direction anticipated by the trader. Thus, the trader's function is to attempt to develop a Trading Plan which strikes a fine balance between profit seeking and risk control, for creating risk-adjusted profits in excess of the return on market indexes. Once the trader has developed an objective Trading Plan, the actual execution of the Plan requires market price monitoring and responsive order entry/cancellation activity. It is known that even brief lapses in trader attentiveness and immediate reaction to market changes will often result in violation of the Trading Plan, and thereby upset the Trading Plan's fine balance between profit seeking and risk control. In this regard, active traders often have limited opportunities to invest their time in other important activities, such as research.
The other topic of attention is the rapid growth of the global computer network (i.e., the Internet) and the increasing level of influence it is having on virtually every facet of everyday life. A cursory scan of television programming, magazines or newspapers on almost any given day demonstrates how the Internet is becoming a tool of steadily increasing importance for both business and personal activities. This has included using the Internet to facilitate the trading of financial instruments on-line.
In this regard, the financial institutions, including brokerages, which make up and/or provide access to the various financial instruments marketplaces, have implemented “on-line” services which allow customers to engage in trading over data communications networks, including the Internet. As a result, nearly any investor having access to the Internet may more directly engage in trading activity without being forced to speak to a broker to enter their orders in the marketplace for execution.
While that development has significantly reduced order entry labor for the on-line brokerages, their trader/customers' order entry labor burden remains largely unchanged, merely converted from dialing the telephone to tapping the computer keyboard keys and clicking the mouse. Therefore, those who are not ready, willing or able to make themselves constantly available to monitor the markets and immediately manually enter their orders in response to changes in market conditions, are still precluded from the benefits to be derived from the consistent and disciplined conformance with an objective Trading Plan.
It is therefore evident that there exists a need in the art for a more efficient method and system for trade order entry in comparison to the prior art.